Don't you suppose the nerds who programmed the site did that on purpose?

No, it's the result of Google's rating system. There was a campaign among webmasters and bloggers to link to that page using the words "miserable failure".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3298443.stm" [Broken]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/09/google_bush_search/" [Broken]